1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to accessing data over a computer network, and in particular to constructing dynamic universal resource locators (URLs) to access media content.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World Wide Web of interlinked data residing on computer servers located throughout the Internet has become a very popular mechanism for distributing information among a wide audience. Many content publishers now provide streaming media and other types of multimedia content. A piece of content is accessed through a URL that specifies the location and name of the content.
Sometimes, a publisher desires to restrict access to the content it provides. For example, a publisher that provides advertisements might seek to insure that the advertisements are only downloaded by clients that contemporaneously download the web page on which the advertisements appear. One technique for restricting access to content is the use of dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is a URL for specific content that is valid for only a short period of time. Thus, the dynamic URL can be used to download advertisements and/or other content at the time the web page on which the content appears is downloaded, but the dynamic URL cannot be used to later access the content.
However, using dynamic URLs in this manner presents difficulties for third parties that have legitimate needs to access the content. For example, a third party that serves advertisements incorporating the content from the publisher might need to access the content to determine policy compliance, generate thumbnail views of the content, index the content for web searching, and/or for other purposes. The third party needs to access the content on its own schedule, and thus cannot use dynamic URLs because the URLs are likely to have expired by the time the third party seeks the content. Therefore, there is a need for a way to allow legitimate third parties to access content from a publisher at any given time, while still maintaining the security afforded by dynamic URLs.